


i'll come home and raise you up to what's left

by throats



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Catholicism, Claire Temple Deserves Better, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Past Luke Cage/Claire Temple - Freeform, Past Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 23:59:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17171951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throats/pseuds/throats
Summary: She’s at the laundromat when she hears the news.-a post s3 matt/claire fix-it fic, of sorts.





	i'll come home and raise you up to what's left

**Author's Note:**

> i, like most folks, am severely bummed the show was cancelled. i chose to cope by figuring out how to reconcile claire's place in the netflix mcu. not only with matt, but how to marry all the different facets of claire we saw in daredevil, iron fist, luke cage, and jessica jones.
> 
> unbeta'd, so all mistakes are my own, but shoutout to the handful of folks who read bits of this as i was writing it and encouraged me on
> 
> there's some meditations on god, matt's suicide attempt, and fear because i'm me. with all that said, read on.

She’s at the laundromat when she hears the news.

 _We are just receiving news of an attack on_ The New York Bulletin _by the vigilante Daredevil. It’s unclear right now why Daredevil, famous for helping NYPD put the now free ‘kingpin’ of crime, Wilson Fisk, behind bars, would commit an act that Captain Misty Knight is calling a terrorist attack, but the death toll has reached five and counting. We’re on the scene with —_

She drops her detergent. It spills all over her sandals.

Claire pulls her dirty laundry out of the machine and buys a plane ticket.

 

* * *

 

The city is a mess when she lands. FBI crawls over every street corner of Manhattan, every subway stop.

The old burner’s been long disconnected. Claire avoids Harlem, Chinatown, and doesn’t listen to the radio.

She walks the blocks of Hell’s Kitchen in the dark, her _bagh nakh_ shoved deep, deep into the pockets of her coat. The cold steel is a sharp comfort.

Claire tracks those fifteen blocks, checks alleys and fire escapes like she’s hunting for a lost pet. She has to _see_ , has to _know —_

 

* * *

 

She’s there when people start to spill out into the street. Their screams echo and ricochet off brick and steel and concrete. She’s running before she knows it; one hand slipping out of her pocket to the carabiner on her kit, slung over her shoulder. The ID from the shelter is months out of date, but she doesn’t think anyone is going to check.

A young woman nearly slams into her. Claire’s other hand coming out to steady her. She shakes under Claire’s palm. “Hey, hey,” Claire says, her voice switching to the calmest it’s been in days. She leans back a little, meets the woman’s tearful gaze. “What’s happening?”

“Daredevil,” she gasps, turning her head over her shoulder to look. Claire follows her gaze. At least fifteen people, maybe more are racing down the block from the church. A few have their arms slung around a handful of men whose heads are hung, limping. “—the church.”

“I’m a nurse,” Claire replies. Her fear is a dull roar in the background; she zeroes her attention onto the scene before her. “Are you hurt?”

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t go inside the church.

It’s a war of _can’t_ or _won’t_ that leaves her sitting on the bench outside the wide shut doors, listening to the city with her eyes closed. She can’t hear what’s going on inside the church, not through the stone. (Not like Matt, who she’s sure already knows she’s here; too cowardly to go inside.)

She doesn’t talk to God; hasn’t talked to him since the night she left New York for the second time, angry at herself and utterly, utterly afraid.

Afraid of Luke, afraid _for_ Luke, afraid of _herself_ – of what she’s become, what choices she’s made that always ends with a building that collapses in her dreams.

When it’s over, at least thirty people spilling onto the sidewalk, Claire slips into the crowd. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here. It’s not like she _knew_ Father Lantom, hell, Matt only mentioned his priest to her once or twice, not even by name. She grew up going to a church in North Harlem, one that did Spanish mass on Sunday mornings.

(It’s the same thing that drove her to the street for three nights. She has to _know_ , has to _see_.)

And when she does, it nearly bowls her over. Her knees give. Her hand scrapes against the stone of the church as she tries to right herself, just on the edge of the crowd.

The back of slim shoulders, still as stone; dark grey suit that curves across his frame; auburn tossed through his hair with by the steady beat of the mid-morning sunlight.

Air turns to stone in her chest. It becomes impossible to breathe.

Until it isn’t. The human body is an incredible thing.

At the sound of her ragged inhale, his head tilts. Stilted, bird-like. A movement that’s always toed the line between graceful and unsettling. Across from him, Karen Page – severe and sharp as ever in her black coat – falters in her words as she, too, recognizes the shift in his attention.

Over the low murmurs of the crowd, Claire doesn’t hear whatever they say to each other. Instead, she watches as Karen turns her head away, nodding over Matt’s shoulder to where she stands. Her body doesn’t feel like her own; she’s almost above it, watching.

Matthew Murdock begins to turn.

Claire watches.

A handful of blocks and years downtown, she watches herself pull a blind man out of a dumpster. Everything she has known and will know rearranges around him.

She watches the blind man beat another man on the roof of her building. She guides his hand as he stabs him under the supraorbital foramen. Everything she knows about herself changes.

Watching as he says, quiet as a prayer, _Matthew; my name is Matthew_. Claire knows in that moment that she will never recover from this night.

She watches him leave her in his apartment. Murder in his step, but not his heart. She knows she has to leave.

Watches herself, elbow deep in his blood, pull his body back together and remind it how to be a body with silk thread, a thousand curses and a thousand more prayers in Spanish. She wonders if she was supposed to leave.

Watching as she calls him a martyr and leaves again. She will be washing blood out from under her fingernails for days.

Watching as he catches her, as if her falling out a window was the most important thing he had to stop.

She watches herself, six months ago, leaving the city and another man. The blind man is in the ground and the night she pulled him from the gutter feels like a lifetime ago.

In the present moment, the blind man turns to face her.  

And there he is.

He looks like hell. Bruising at one temple, a shattering of blacks, blues, browns, and greens. A scrape on the opposite cheek, the dried blood there darker than the red glass that flashes sunlight away from his eyes and to hers. His hand on his cane shows red burns on his knuckles, as if he’s been punching rope for hours.

Even the way he walks towards her tells a wordless story. The stiffness in his movements betraying a broken rib or two. The fact that his body is so familiar, even now, is enough to make her stomach do a neat trick that feels like relief.

It takes days for him to reach her and years for her to hold herself upright to meet him.

When he stops — _finally_ — all Claire can do is throw her fists against his chest. Rage comes pouring out her, a high kenning from the back of her throat. It’s wrong, grief-slick, jealous, _wounded_.

And he is steady. His hands cup her shaking elbows while she pounds against his chest. He barely sways. He takes all of her grief and swallows it whole until, suddenly, she’s not angry anymore.

Instead, she’s crying.

Collapsing against his chest, her ear finding the hammer of his heart against his chest. Alive. So, so alive.

The hand that doesn’t hold his cane comes up, cradling the back of her head. His forearm is braced between her shoulder blades, pressing against her spine like a memory. He smells like incense and wound-wash.

“ _Claire._ ”

 

* * *

 

He takes her back to his apartment, because she doesn’t have one anymore (not here, at least) and she’s _not_ about to take him to her mother’s. 

“So, you and Luke —“

“— _how._ ”

His face folds. All guilty lines dragging the corners of his mouth down. He hasn’t taken off his glasses and there’s something in the flash of red lenses that wounds her.

Claire realizes he’s always had them off, when he’s been with her.

Matt takes a long, slow breath. His shoulders come up, then go down, before answering:

“I don’t know, really.” He’s quiet. His words barely register.

Then, more fragile, “I just… woke up.” He inhales. She doesn’t have his hearing, but even for her, the rattle of his breath is unmistakable. “I didn’t want to come back.”

She leans against the wall, just barely in the entrance to his living room. He’s standing by the big windows. Not pacing, but the hand stimming at his hip — fingers tap-tap-tapping his belt, his nerves absolutely bare to her, after all these years — tells her he’s fighting to stay in one place. He jerks his head at the sound of her moving, a tick of his jaw and the lift of his chin towards her.

“I know you didn’t.” She’s surprised by how level she sounds.

Another exhale. His lips coming together and folding down. He turns, giving her an unobstructed view of his profile. Bruises. A new scar reaching from behind his ear, down his neck.

“Luke and I aren’t together anymore,” she ventures forth. The words are a surprise. She didn’t come here to talk about that. But she is, now.

It’s enough to catch his attention. He turns his head towards her again, but doesn’t move his feet. One eyebrow raises over the silver rim of his glasses.

“I don’t live in New York anymore.”

That stills his hands. Matt opens his mouth in surprise. “You left?”

“I —“

She doesn’t know what to say. _How_ to say it. Luke isn’t the man she thought — wanted, maybe — him to be. New York feels like a wound, but she can’t identify the weapon. Was it Luke, really? Or did the wound come earlier and she only finally paid it heed when Luke placed his fist through her wall at the mention of Matt’s name?

“ _The Bulletin_ ,” she veers. Shifts against the wall and crosses her arms over her chest. The _bagh nakh_ rustle in her coat pockets and she’s sure Matt can hear them, the way he stills a little more, a subtle movement of his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet, a tilt of his head and flare of his nostrils ( _he’s smelling the steel_ , she realizes). “Was that you?”

Matt’s form collapses in on itself. His weight settles and his shoulder turn in. He shakes his head, angry, and his voice is damp when he speaks, “No.” He inhales, shoves his wrist against his nose. “Fisk — he, he…” Another shake of his head. “He had a man. An FBI agent. Wear the suit.”

Claire is silent for a long moment. So is Matt.

“He framed you.”

Matt lifts his hand and Claire notices an angry looking wound, a the shine of a new scar and recently removed stitches, in the palm of his hand.

(In her memory, she stitches the wound in his side, barely able to keep his organs inside, praying, praying; praying and remembering that Christ, too, was pierced through the side and rose again.

 _Martyr_ , her mind whispers. A chill pulls down her spine.)

“Yeah,” Matt replies. He’s angry now. Pouting and pacing now, crossing from the living room to where his counter cuts his kitchen from the rest of the apartment. “And people died because I made myself — good people. Father Lantom —“ His voice breaks, wet and splintered.

He presses a fist to his mouth and Claire watches him barely suppress a sob.

“I wanted… I wanted to kill him, for that.”

Claire doesn’t move. She feels so much older here. Where a younger version of herself stood and asked Matt what _whatever it takes_ meant.

They are both quiet for a long time.

“And did you?” She knows the answer to this question. It’s been all over the news. Fisk taken into NYPD custody. Even she hadn’t been able to avoid it.

But she wants to hear him say it.

He sniffles again and shakes his head. “I couldn’t,” he whispers.

Matt stills by the counter. She watches him inhale, slow. The lift of his chest. Can see, just barely, his eyes close in profile. Then the exhale that follows. The lowering of his shoulders.

Claire lets herself breathe. Allows relief to slowly unfurl in her middle.

“I thought that the only way to fight a monster was to be one,” he says, finally. Another shake of his head, this one smaller than the last. His chin is pointed down, demure shoulders curled around him like a protective shell. “I…” He shakes his head again.

Lifts his attention again. Something harsher in the way he moves now. He stalks from the counter to the table, the table where he’d told her his name and she’d held his hand to her fearful heart.

He lifts his wounded hand. The glasses come away in them. He uses both hands to fold them and slips them into the breast pocket of his dress shirt. His unfocused eyes are green and gold and full of water. “You know, I asked him once — Father Lantom — if God had put the Devil in me.”

Matt’s tone is almost admonishing, the crack of self-deprecation clawing up between his words. “Before… before I fought with Nobu. Before I killed him.” Then, with a bitter raise of his eyebrows and a caustic turn of his mouth, “Or. Thought I did.”

The fight before she left; the one where Foggy had called her, panicked beyond words. The only thing he’d been able to say was _Matt — please._ She’d known he’d done whatever he needed to make it out of that building alive, and she’d told him that when he woke the first time, strung out on fear and pain.

(She does not think he remembers that. Her hands smoothing over his auburn hair, pulling his head into her lap, too afraid to embrace any other part of him, for fear of damaging any of her careful stitches. Whispering, _You’re okay; you survived, Matt, you’re alive, it’s all that matters._

His friend, Foggy, had been dispatched for more gauze, more tape, anything he could get from the 24-hour pharmacy up the block. He’d looked almost relieved to go.)

In the present, Matt continues, “And he told me… he told me that maybe this… this thing inside me was my better nature. That the Devil exists because fear… fear motivates people to the light.”

Claire tells herself not to think of Luke.

(She thinks of Luke.)

“And I thought… I thought I understood it,” Matt says. His next breath is tired. Deep and _weary_.

Claire, not knowing when she looked away from him, lifts her head at the sound.

“Because I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of Fisk or anyone he had on his side. I knew what my cause was and I knew God would think it righteous, so I wasn’t afraid.” He stops then. His mouth clicks shut. He stands, an angry line above the table, for a moment. His voice is small, when he continues: “But I was, Claire.”

She waits for him.

“I was so _afraid_ ,” Matt whispers, wrecked. “Of what would happen if I didn’t… if he… Of losing people. I was so afraid, I pushed everyone away. And then —”

 _Elektra_ hangs unsaid between them, lost, just as Matt had feared.

“So when she came back, I thought…” She watches his Adam’s Apple bob as he swallows. He tugs on his tie, pulling it ragged and loose. Undoes the top button of his collar.“I thought it was God, giving me a chance to never have to lose anything again.”

His words lance through her ribs. “By dying,” Claire finishes.

Matt lifts his head. His attention finds hers and from the look on his face, it’s like he’s just putting it together for the first time, everything he’s done. He closes his eyes and his face hangs off his bones like a burned out building.  

“Yes.”

Claire closes her eyes and nods. She takes a deep breath. Opens her eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of the fact that she knows the next part of this story. “So when you woke up…”

“I thought that it meant God didn’t care. That there was no second chance. That He had abandoned me and so I abandoned Him. I abandoned everything with Him. My friends… my life. I thought… if I acted like a dead man, then...”

“You’d have no fear.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“What changed?”

He pauses, lost now again. Claire watches him search for the words. A thin cord of leather flashes at his neck. She notices, then, the shape of a cross, pressing against his shirt.  “Someone I knew… a few people, actually,” this he adds with the barest twitch of a smile, a bittersweet memory, then, “they showed me to act without fear is to act despite it.”

An ache radiates through her chest. She knows when someone is talking about the dead. “They sound like good people.”

“Yeah,” he echoes, the sad smile returning, stronger, now. “They were. Are.”

“Are?” Claire raises an eyebrow.

He nods, tilting his head a little as he does. “Yeah,” he says. There’s a pink flush to the tops of his ears. He’s gone _sheepish_. “I, uh. Met my mother.”

Claire’s weight sways back against the wall. Her eyes widen. “Oh.” It seems like the only thing she can say.

Matt rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah. She —” He swallows. “She’s a nun. She, uh. Stitched me up, while you were gone.”

There’s about a hundred things to unpack in that one sentence, let alone everything else he’s said. She doesn’t know how to reply.

Except, apparently, she does. “Well, considering everything, the fact that you’re still standing is probably a testament to her. Can I send a nun a fruit basket?”

It’s the first thing she’s said to warrant a laugh out of anyone in months and he obliges, giving her a hearty laugh that would feel dissonant with the room if it didn’t send the careful ball of relief in Claire’s chest unraveling out, out, out into her limbs. His eyes crinkle and those small black triangles form at the corners of his mouth as he throws his head back in laughter.

“I’ll pass along the approval,” he says.

 

* * *

 

It’s the following Sunday and Claire still hasn’t left New York.

The hospital in Miami wants to know when she’ll be back and when she tells them she doesn’t know, they tell her she has until the end of the month to tell them or they’ll make the decision for her.

Claire goes to church in The Kitchen, travelling down from her mother’s in Harlem. Her mother, surprised by her sudden interest in returning to church, demands to go with her.

After mass, a familiar mess of red-brown hair catches her eye. His head is bowed in conversation with an older woman in a habit. Her eyes are an equally familiar sharp hazel.

What’s more alarming is that she notices Claire’s attention and touches Matt’s arm. He turns and allows himself to be led by the nun to where she and her mother stand on the sidewalk.

“So this is the night nurse my son has told me so much about,” the nun says instead of hello and before either Matt or Claire can get a word out. She has a rich alto and her smile is more smirk than Claire’s ever thought appropriate for a nun. She can immediately see the family resemblance.

Matt’s flushing. Claire isn’t staring. “Sister Maggie, this is Claire, my…”

“Friend,” she finishes, reaching out to offer the sister her hand. When they shake her grip is firm. “And this is my mom, Soledad.”

Her mother preens. Claire’s pretty sure it’s been a lifelong dream of her mother’s to hear a nun say something about her with warmth. “Hello Sister,” she says, shaking Maggie’s hand as well.

“Mom, this is Matthew,” Claire says, carefully adding, “We met a few years ago.” She swallows, suddenly nervous, “Before I met Luke.”

Her mother’s eyes widen, understanding. “Matthew,” she says. Her voice stays warm, but when Matt holds his hand out in greeting, she takes it with both hands. “It is good to meet you.”

“It’s good to meet you, Ms. Temple,” he replies. Matt rubs his thumb over the handle of his cane, a nervous tick Claire recognizes easily. “Sorry to interrupt your morning,” he says to her. “My…” His mouth makes an awkward twist.

“It’s my fault,” the sister jumps in. “I can’t keep my nose out of anything.” She spares a wry glance to Claire’s mother and Claire swears she can see a _twinkle_ in the nun’s eye when she address Claire’s mother, “We serve coffee and pastries in the rectory, why don’t we get to know each other over a danish.”

Soledad looks to Claire. Her cheeks are burning, suddenly, but she waves her mother away. “We’ll catch up.”

Matt’s just as red in the face as Claire feels when the two older women walk away. He twists his cane in his wrist. “Sorry about her, I didn’t know she’d just —”

Claire chews her bottom lip before shaking her head and cutting him off. “It’s okay, really. I think you made a lifelong dream of my mother’s come true.”

Matt raises an eyebrow. “To be randomly accosted after mass?”

Claire laughs. “No. She’s been waiting since my Catholic school days to hear a nun say nice things about me.”

“You weren’t a good little Catholic girl?”

Claire hums. “Wouldn’t you like to know.” It’s so easy to slip into this with him. Bantering like she’s stitching him up at her kitchen table. Like the last year hasn’t happened. Like the last three years, really.

He goes quiet when she does and from the way he shifts his cane around, she can tell he’s chewing on a question, so she waits him out.

“I… didn’t expect you to be here.”

“I didn’t expect to be here either,” she admits, quiet.

He nods, his jaw working just enough to be noticeable. “Are you… planning on staying in New York?”

Claire inhales, taking in the scent of the incense spilling out from the church and the garbage on the street beginning to cook in the warming weather. She might not have as sensitive a nose as he does, but she can still take in New York this way. Can still recognize it as _home_ after months away.

“I’m thinking about it.”

They both smile.


End file.
